Month: November 2014

Yesterday I was invited to do a talk at the UK Microsoft Dynamics CRM User Group (CRMUG) in Microsoft offices in Reading, United Kingdom. It was a great opportunity to talk about a subject that is close to my heart which is managing the impact of business change in CRM projects and specifically the #MSDynCRM ones.

I had great interactive audience which meant we all worked together in the session to explore the few points I wanted to discuss. One of these important points in my mind was, how to define a success Dynamics CRM project? Is it No Priority 1 (P1), P2 issues? Is it the fact it is within budget and on time? No scope creep? how about ensuring you are hitting your margin / profit / revenue forecast?

In my view, it’s none of the above. You can deliver a great technological solution with minimal bugs (or even no issues at all!), but the question really is: Has it delivered the expected business benefits? Has it achieved the overall business objective? how is marked against the programme benefit case? Or does the project actually has a benefits case that you are working against aiming to deliver?

In this CRM User group, and with the help with a lively audience, we managed to explore how we can actually define the success of the project by debating all of the above questions. I appreciate there is no right or wrong answer but I guess we reached a consensus on what would make a programme of change a success.

Following that, we started to discuss managing the business transformation and change in your project… but that, is the subject of another blog post.

In the mean time, if you would like a copy of my slides, please feel free to ask via a comment below and I’ll email it to you.